By Richard Winters
My Rating: 1 out of 10
4-Word Review: Boyhood home is haunted.
Larry (Gene Wilder) and Vickie (Gilda Radner) are performers on a popular radio show who are also engaged to be married. Ever since the wedding date has been set Larry has been going through a variety of odd behaviors including flubbing his lines and even making incoherent statements during the production that go over the air. Vickie thinks it’s just his nerves about getting married, but Dr. Paul Abbott (Paul L. Smith), who also happens to be Larry’s uncle, thinks it’s much more than that. He feels the only way to cure him will be shock therapy, or in this case to ‘scare him to death’. Since Larry plans on having his wedding at his boyhood home, which is an old rural castle, the doctor feels this will be the perfect spot to engage with the frights. Everyone on the premises is in on the plan, eventually even including Vickie, but as the make believe haunting commences it soon becomes obvious that there’s some real scares too that frightens everyone.
Gene grew up as a child reportedly scared of horror movies and tried to avoid them, but did enjoy what he called ‘comedy chillers’, which were movies that had some scares, but also balanced with laughs and sought out to create one of his own. He started writing the script while he was starring in Silver Streak, but then lost interest and put it away. While he was filming Hanky Panky, in which he met Radner whom he later married, he got interested in continuing with the script especially at her insistence as she felt it would make a great vehicle for the two.
The problem with it is that he created something completely out of touch with the times. Haunted houses, werewolves and other elements from 1930’s movies had all been parodied for decades to the point it had almost become a cliche in itself. This film adds nothing fresh to the mix and feeds off of gags and stunts that had been done hundreds of times making it lame right from the start. Had it been more updated to add in elements from modern day horror movies, or changed the setting so it wasn’t just the predictable rural castle complete with thunder and lightning outside, then maybe it might’ve had a chance, or at least piqued people’s interests, but as it is here the stuff is routine and lacking in originality.
The biggest shock is that you have Dom DeLuise in full drag and yet he isn’t funny at all. Wilder got the idea to use him for the part when he saw him impersonate Ethel Barrymore years earlier at a dinner theater he attended, but the mistake was that Gene wanted him to literally play it straight, but why put a guy in full female get-up if you’re not going to give it any type of payoff? It’s a shame too because I’ve found Dom to sometimes be quite hilarious and even be the scene stealer in some of his other films. Jonathan Pryce, who was also in the movie, stated how the entire cast and crew would sit around and let Dom entertain them between takes, but whatever he said and did off camera was missing onscreen and even the duet that he sings with Gilda fails to elicit even a chuckle.
The story creates this big set-up and then goes nowhere with it. Gene gives himself a few amusing bits and I suppose Bryan Pringle, who plays the aging butler named Pfister, and even Ann Way with her distinctive hawk-like facial features, have a couple of funny moments, but everything else falls flat including Radner who isn’t funny at all and overall given a very thankless part by no less than her own husband.
The film lost money at the box office and despite a month of promotions and ads it only managed to remain in theaters for week before it was pulled. It polled poorly amongst critics and audiences alike, which is probably the only real funny thing is what occurred behind-the-scense as the studio, Orion Pictures, refused to screen it for critics before giving it a general release. Usually when this happens it’s a sign that the studio heads know they have a stinker on their hands, but they denied this saying they were ‘very comfortable’ with the movie and ‘behind it 100 percent’ and only avoided the advance screening because there had been a ‘tendency lately by critics to be quite vicious about films’ in general and they didn’t want to ‘cater’ to that, but you’d think if they really knew they had a great movie their fear of ‘vicious reviews’ wouldn’t have been a factor.
My Rating: 1 out of 10
Released: July 25, 1986
Runtime: 1 Hour 22 Minutes
Rated PG
Director: Gene Wilder
Studio: Orion Pictures
Available: DVD, Blu-ray
Scopophilia 